Duck Dynasty: A mirror into the conservative heart of America, or just good television?

In the opening of last week’s episode of the highest-rated American cable series in history, two brothers sat in a kitchen, playing a board game. Their wives discussed the upcoming anniversary of the family matriarch and patriarch. No one was sure of the date.

One of the brothers spoke up. No one remembers the date, he explained, because the parents didn’t have a real wedding. It was a justice-of-the-peace thing. He said this with the air of someone proud to have known something the others didn’t.

Of course, as anyone who has watched a family comedy knows, such hubris does not go unpunished for long. And what followed was a trope that would have fit perfectly on anything from Family Ties to Home Improvement to Everybody Loves Raymond.

The wives wanted to throw a wedding. The husbands wanted no part of it. The wives got their way. Standard sitcom fare, except this isn’t a sitcom, at least not in the technical sense. It is Duck Dynasty, the huge A&E hit about a family of podunk millionaires in West Monroe, Louisiana.

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Canadians can be forgiven their bewilderment upon hearing last week of the record ratings that Duck Dynasty earned with the opening of its latest season. Though the series about the Robertson clan, who made their fortune in the duck-call business, is now in its fourth season, it only debuted about 18 months ago. Shows like Mad Men and Breaking Bad have been known to take that much time between seasons. And its popularity curve has been extraordinarily steep. From an average of under 2 million U.S. viewers in the first season, almost doubling in each of the next two seasons, and bowing last week to an audience of more than 11 million — or almost three times the size of the audience that watched one of the final episodes of Breaking Bad, a show regarded by most critics as one of the best televised dramas ever.

Duck Dynasty‘s remarkable arc has the TV industry and observers wondering, as elder Phil Robertson might put it, just what the cuss has happened?

The search for the Deeper Meaning of Duck Dynasty has taken the chin-scratchers to a few places. To start, there is the redneck thing. The series taps into the zeitgeist of all things y’all, from popular series like Swamp Hunters (not to be confused with Swamp People), Cajun Pawn Stars and Here Comes Honey Boo Boo to the baffling success of comedians like Larry the Cable Guy. The Robertsons, with their long hair and beards, stars-and-stripes headbands, and unabashed love of the woods and of shooting the things that live in them, cheerfully play up the stereotype. (And quite possibly exaggerate it: There are suggestions that the family wasn’t as nearly as southern fried until they realized how well it played on TV.)

There’s also a theory that Duck Dynasty signals the American embrace of good, clean family fun. The Robertsons are a God-fearing bunch, and prayers before meals are a staple. As an editorial in the Baptist Press put it last week, “In an entertainment culture thick with the stench of sexual innuendo and the foul odor of every dysfunction imaginable, Duck Dynasty is a breath of fresh air. The content is clean and features a close-knit intact family who are unapologetic about their Christian faith.”

Or, as another conservative commentator put it, the show is “pro-God, pro-guns, pro-hunting and pro-family,” which stands in contrast “to the cultural-coarsening bilge that Hollywood and Manhattan churn out with predictable regularity.” (A&E, somewhat awkwardly for the purposes of that argument, has offices in L.A. and New York.)

In this theory, Duck Dynasty is successful because it presents a version of the American Dream. From humble beginnings, an empire was born. And it’s a particularly modern version, too, with the heroes belonging to a segment of the population that until recently was most exemplified on television by Cletus Spuckler and his oft-pregnant wife, Brandine, the resident hillbillies in the town of Springfield, on The Simpsons. The author and scholar Charles Murray’s recent book, Coming Apart, argues that the United States has undergone a transformative shift in which the underclass, once dominated by minority groups, now includes a swath of white Americans from broken homes with high rates of unemployment and low rates of higher education. Phil Robertson, married at the town hall to a teenage bride, would seem to have been on the fast track toward such a life. Instead, he made the perfect duck call and, eventually, a fortune. The Robertsons are living proof that the ability to expertly gut and clean a catfish and found a multi-million-dollar business are not mutually exclusive traits.

But, while grandpa Phil made headlines recently with some stridently pro-life comments — hardly a controversial stance in his home state — the show makes no attempt to present the family as right-wing firebrands. They are firm in their beliefs, and not shy about them, but not overly preachy either. If anything, the elder men — Phil and his brother, crazy uncle Si — are resigned to the fact that the family’s youngest generation will trade the swamp for the shopping mall. The Robertsons may share values that are close to those typically held in middle America, but they are such a jovial group, and self-mockingly aware of their rural roots, that they wouldn’t come across as threatening even to those latte-sipping hippies who live on the liberal coasts. They sit comfortably at the crossroads of the two Americas. Willie Robertson, the “main” character of Duck Dynasty and now the chief executive of the family business, wears designer sunglasses and the flag bandana he wraps around his shaggy head is not a Confederate one, but an American one.

Attempts to find a cultural explanation for the success of the show, though, perhaps pale next to the most obvious factor: that it’s a very well-crafted series, and a better sitcom than most sitcoms. The characters, while real people, are reliably familiar: the men complain when their wives ask them to do chores, and the ladies, ever patient, know just how to manipulate them into doing what they want.

As with the wedding episode this season, you can see where the stories are going before the show gets there. In an episode from the first season, Willie discovers that his eldest daughter, Sadie, has a boyfriend. He of course professes outrage.

“She’s a teenager,” says his wife, Korie. “They have boyfriends.”

“She’s 13!,” he says, exasperated.

“Fourteen,” she corrects.

“Whatever,” he says. This is where the laugh track would kick in.

The show’s large audience would seem to be at peace with the fact that the set ups are often contrived, probably because in the end it can be quite funny. Whether the Robertsons speak off the cuff, or have their lines written for them, they know a thing or two about timing and delivery. When Willie and his brother Jase take Sadie’s boyfriend out snake hunting, Willie soon ends up unloading most of a clip into the first snake he sees. Cut to Jase, sagely informing the camera: “Willie is as wound up as a coondog trying to pass a peach seed.” Then he continues the explanation. “They walk around all day on their tiptoes. It’s quite a show.”

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